


White Knight Position

by blesser



Series: Leng T'che (Death by a Thousand Cuts) [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Blankets, Dogs, Featuring Emotional Confusion, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mid-Season One, Murder Family, Murderous Thoughts, Sexual Tension, Voilently Soppy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 22:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7011091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blesser/pseuds/blesser
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will laughs like broken china -a weary, jagged, abrasive sound- and he reaches for the bottle of scotch.</p><p>"I would hope my mind palace would have functioning space heaters,” he says, “and asprin.”</p><p>***</p><p> <em>I need you to be a monster / which is to say, I am trying not to love you / which is to say, I am dreaming of kissing your claws</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	White Knight Position

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Bithday to Dark_And_Twisted_Thing here is a gift of emotionally confused, romantically violent Hannibal ft. cuddly feelings and a dishevelled tuxedo... because I know what you are about son.

It’s a little red line only about half an inch long, a tiny imperfect and jagged thing of no consequence really.

Hannibal can’t stop looking at it.

Will runs a hand down his face tiredly and keeps it there, his jaw twitching as he supresses another yawn and drawing Hannibal’s gaze away from the offending cut on his forehead. He is slumped in the lumpy armchair in his own damn house but still looks somehow out of place and uncomfortable, ready to drop in every respect aside from the tension of his shoulders and the constant, subtle movement of his body. His hands clench against the arm of the chair in one moment, then he is tapping the glass of tightly held scotch the next, all the while his wild eyes continue to scan the room and the doors.

He looks like a man awoken from a nightmare with sleep paralysis, trapped and exhausted.

 

** 

 

_“An almost unconscious state of hypervigilance,” Hannibal explains as they drive away from the crash site “All very expected.”_

_He glances in the review mirror to look at Abigail sat in the middle seat, wide eyed but silent as a doe in headlights. Shrinking into the distance is Will’s totalled car with its crumpled bonnet, a spray of broken glass all around it which throws upwards reflections of the amber, late afternoon sun._

_“The trembling should stop in an hour or so.”_

_Words of comfort were always easy to pluck from the air for Hannibal. Looking now at Will’s hands resting and twitching against the dashboard they tumble out of his mouth, seemingly without permission or agenda._

_“It’s all right_ _Will.”_

_Will nods perfunctorily, turns in his chair with a soft sigh to look back at Abigail and then seems to close his eyes at the sight of her. As he tips his head back against the rest a thin trickle of blood starts working its way down his temple._

_Hannibal tightens his hands on the wheel and puts his eyes_ _carefully back on the road._

 

**

 

“Try something more familiar. I understand if home is... difficult for you, but you need something with focus or this simply won’t work.”

Abigail is sitting with her feet tucked under her on the carpet, the closest of the three of them to the ticking space heater and hemmed in by a mound of softly snuffling fur. She has little circles of colour in her pale cheeks now.

She had spent several minutes by the car in shock, in the rain, and the second they walked into the house Hannibal insisted with a firm but gentle fierceness that she be made warm. Will hadn’t even blinked when Hannibal helped Abigail into one of his own crumpled plaid shirts, just excused himself to make tea, which seemed to involve a lot of staring into the open refrigerator and supressed sighing.

Abigail has her eyes shut tight and nose crinkling, first in concentration and then frustration. She lets out an irritated huff and opens her eyes.

“Is it difficult for you?” she asks almost accusatorily.

“Focus?”

“Home.”

Hannibal feels Will look down at them at where they are perched on the floor through the fingers of his hand. Up until now he has sat as a quiet but unignorable presence in the corner of the room. He is noiselessly loud somehow, emits a thrumming sort of energy which shakes the mood like angry hornets. Hannibal clears his throat and smiles at Abigail, almost genuinely.

“You’ve been to my home Abigail. And you should be able to see that it is a place I find great comfort in - because I have made it that way.”

Abigail smiles -thin lipped- at his obvious evasiveness but she doesn’t say anything. Instead she pushes her hair behind her ears and closes her eyes again. Concentrating and building. He can see her eyes moving slightly under the thin skin of her eyelids.

_What do you see?_

“The trees,” she says quietly, “I remember every tree in the forest by the cabin, every blind and thicket. Won’t that do?” Abigail looks up with expectant saucer eyes which flick between the two of them, her hands upturned and questioning.

Hannibal sees the imprinted memory of blood on her hands and he knows that Will does too.

_“Are we going to re-enact the crime?”_

Will hasn’t offered much verbal input into the evening, but he isn’t spaced out anymore and the sound of a decanter knocking the edge of a glass breaks the silence. Will takes a long, drowning gulp and Hannibal notices the twitch in his own hands folded in his lap as he sits still, warring with the desire to snatch up the drink and fling it in the fire and the urge to push the bottle imperceptibly closer to Will.

For almost another hour, as the little house darkens and Will’s mood follows suit, Abigail and Hannibal remain on the floor of Will’s house. Hannibal tries valiantly to weave the magic of the Mind Palace around Abigail, tries to guide her towards some kind of cognitive state of peace or at least distraction.

While he speaks, low and soft as more of the dogs lower their heads and the decanter empties, there is a hush about the place, but in his own mind there is a riot occurring.

Hannibal sits in a middle pew of the Church of the Gesù with notebooks and parchment on his knee and on the chair, spilling onto the ornate floor. His mouth tells Abigail about finding forgiveness, helps her walk through the trees and look for hollow trunks or hunting blinds. His hands speak louder with their intention however, too long without to appreciate the real difference between defending and attacking. And so he draws, sits out of sight in a church with a head full of violence.

Abigail talks about leaving memories buried in the bank of stones by a stream and Hannibal takes them to the church, draws the woman with her hands full of stones, her aim true and bluntly shocking to his heart. He fills her mouth with the stones, bricks her up into a wall, takes meticulous, steady care in sketching the twisted, metal snarl of a car impaled all through with gate poles.

He draws blood, tells Abigail fairytales. Tries to speak louder than the crunch of feet on the gravel outside that their overzealous protective detail are making. Anything –anything- to stop the feeling in his gut every time he looks at the cut on Will’s head.

Psychoanalysing himself he might uncover that this is a reminder that there are things out of Hannibal’s control, forces at work that might take things away from him or change them without his permission. However, the surface feeling is a darker and more predatory thing but also softer, terrifyingly domestic.

Hannibal hasn’t been scared in a long time.

 

**

 

_Officially they call Hannibal because he is a listed guardian and next of kin for Abigail Hobbs. And when your charge is released from a psychiatric recovery centre only to be attacked pulling out of the driveway by a grieving mother with a handful of heavy rocks, a heartful of vengeance and her head full of thoughts of her daughter ripped to pieces, they tend to call you._

_Unofficially, Jack calls Hannibal away from a very pleasant champagne reception at the Baltimore Fine Arts benefit gala because Abigail’s other next of kin was next to her when the brick hit the window, when the wheels span on the rain slicked road and the impact of collision had knocked their skulls against the window. Will had only been cut by the glass, minor concussion at best, but Jack couldn’t get him to let go of the steering wheel for twenty minutes._

_Hannibal expects to need his kid gloves. He hangs up from Jack and slips his phone into his pocket, sets his flute of champagne down as he makes his apologies. He gathers up his expectations, prepares to deal with a shattered and malleable thing. He couldn’t have been more wrong in his expectations. Because the encounter has consumed Will Graham by something that he doesn’t allow himself to indulge in often: rage._

_Hannibal clocks it as soon as he pulls up to the scene of the crash_ _to see Will leaning against the open door of the first responders vehicle, blood on his face and eyes on fire as he watches a light being shone into Abigail’s eyes. Will doesn’t even look at Hannibal when he draws up next to them, just squints up at the sky and speaks._

_“Are you staying?”_

_“Of course.”_

_Will’s seething only continues to grow as he gives his monosyllabic report of what happened. The brick came out of nowhere, thrown at the passenger window, at -her-, lost control of the car, the woman screaming from the side of the road… Jack claps Will hard on the shoulder but looks past Will at Hannibal instead as he speaks, says the words ‘lucky’ and ‘victim’ so many times until Will looks like he wants to run, punch, sleep for a hundred years._

_Hannibal stands to the side and waits for them be cleared by the paramedics, a watchful and unobtrusive presence. He steps in smoothly_ , _cups his hand under Will’s elbow with just a brush of fingertips to the wet material of his coat and silently gesticulates the Bentley parked just up the road. Will moves without pause. Hannibal opens the door for Abigail and guides her into the car, onto his white knight steed. Will slams the door with firm noisiness and spends most of the drive glaring in the wing mirror at the escorting patrol car._

_Hannibal doesn’t think he has ever seen anyone look so tired._

 

_**_

 

“It’s a place where you can process, store,” _little fingers slipping out of his grip, snow melting_ _under the hot spray of blood, soldiers boots on the ground, a child’s toothy grin across an elaborately set table_ , “be together.”

“We’re together now.” Abigail says carefully.

“Yes we are.”

“Maybe this is all happening in your mind palace. Perhaps in reality we’re bleeding out on the road."

“Perhaps. But isn’t it more logical that this would be Will’s mind?”

Will laughs like broken china -a weary, jagged, abrasive sound- and he reaches for the bottle of scotch.

“I would hope my mind palace would have functioning space heaters,” He says, “and asprin.”

Hannibal actively stops himself from thinking about soft blankets, driving out in the bad weather to find a pharmacy. His mind runs so dangerously close to thoughts of cooking soup that he has to coax himself back to planning murder just to calm himself down.

“How’s your head?”

Abigail jumps imperceptibly, smooth as a spooked rabbit, in that way she does sometimes when Will speaks to her. She self-consciously raises her fingertips to her head in the exact place the cut is on his. Mirroring. She drops her hand down, unknowingly grazing the scar on her neck as it falls like she is rubbing a lucky penny or prodding at a bruise.

“It’s fine.”

The room is all of a sudden very still, they can hear radio crackling from the Virginia PD patrol car in the driveway and the sound of a fox crying in the forest carries in on the wind. Will blinks slowly and opens his mouth to speak but closes it again just as quickly making his teeth click. The screaming gets closer and more horrifying, it’s the sound of a child’s incomprehensible grief and they all sit unmoved as though they can’t hear it. Hannibal, bow tie already abandoned, unbuttons his cuffs and starts rolling them in half inch folds.

Abigail stands without a word, unfolds herself from the floor and moves towards the stairs. She looks likes she could be a ghost if it wasn’t for the proof which is the sea of dogs parting, rolling out of the way for her real, corporeal body to pass.

“I’m gonna,” She waves her hand upwards, towards the floor where Will had excused himself earlier to set up a bed for her. This was before they had made the unspoken decision to hold a kind of floor level vigil, Abigail staying as far down and away from the windows without realising it and Hannibal indulging her.

“Are you staying?” Will asks when they are alone, like it’s not past three in the morning and a two hour drive from Baltimore; as if Hannibal wasn’t already reclining against the couch with his waistcoat undone, his shoes resting on the muddy welcome mat.

Hannibal clicks his tongue against his teeth and inclines his head.

 

**

 

The many layered sound of sleepy breathing might be what wakes him, or perhaps one of the dogs noisily dreaming or the dying snap of wood in the lowly glowing burner. Hannibal tells himself it is all of these things and lays on his back on the couch for several long minutes looking at the ceiling, tracing the swirling pattern in the plaster over and over and trying to convince himself to go back to sleep, to stop, because he isn’t alone in the room, not really, not with the pack so close on the floor around him. But he doesn’t need to look over to the bed by the window to know that it’s empty.

The littlest dog kicks his short legs ferociously, giving chase. Hannibal’s skin prickles.

He makes no sound with his socked feet as he moves through the house and it is still dark enough that he throws unformed, monster-like shadows up. This time of year seems to allow an early morning swathe of orange light in through the windows, spilling a dark and violently red-ish haze over the floor and up the walls like fire.

The stairs are wooden and creak helpfully so that as Hannibal draws up close behind where Will is stood -halfway up the stairs with his head ducked into a storage closet- he is already half turning expectantly with no surprise on his face. Hannibal doesn’t really have it in him right now to see Will jumpy and afraid.

Will doesn’t do awkward small talk; it is one of Hannibal’s favourite things about their time together, the parts of the sessions and car rides and dinners spent in a full, weighted silence which is always so pressing but never suffocating. It’s the part of them that belongs to Will and Will alone, before Hannibal opens his mouth. He hands over the control to let Will steer and just to see what he will do. Rendering Hannibal Lecter speechless is something that has only ever provoked a response of violence before, like a frightened animal reaction.

Now he puts his weight on the bannister and automatically holds out his arms to take the armful of blankets that Will is pulling from the closet. The blankets are impossibly soft, a predictably tartan, woodfire scented bundle that reminds him ridiculously of the way Will had ducked his head into the fur of one of his dogs only hours before. He refuses to hide his own face in these blankets now, but it’s a close call.

The house creaks and sighs and Will copies it, hands fussing over sheets and towels. How he can see what he is doing in the dim-light Hannibal has no idea, is suddenly shocked at the idea that Will might even be asleep right now. Sleep-closet rummaging isn’t anything they’ve talked about before now.

“Where are you?” Hannibal asks automatically, stupidly, before he can stop himself.

Will chuckles darkly and seems to lose all his frantic, frenetic motion at the sound of Hannibal’s voice, he slumps.

“Don’t do that. Earlier I was in a car and then I was on the side of a road, I was in bed and now I’m here. I know how I get from A to B, I use my damn legs.”

“It isn’t how you get there, it’s whether or not that was your intention.”

“Intention huh? I don’t think I’m in the best mood to talk about my intentions.”

“Is that what has been making you afraid, your intentions?”

Will closes the closet door swiftly and abruptly, Hannibal has to back up into the bannister to make room for him in the tight space.

“I don’t-“ Will jars to a halt, “I’m cold, it is cold and I just want-“

Hannibal has made a profession and a hobby out of watching people flail and drown, but not like this, not in this angry and wild way. In the moments before death, before hopelessness, before a person loses consciousness or feels a hand slip from theirs their eyes fill with this fight. Will Graham stands in front of him now, hemmed in against the wall and seemingly lost in this state of death, the fight and the flight all burning in his eyes.

Hannibal pushes himself of the bannister, painfully aware of his half shed tuxedo and sleep mussed hair and takes that one tiny step towards total eye contact. He drops the blankets rather unceremoniously on the step below.

“You are angry.”

“Yes.”

“For her?”

Will blinks slowly, Hannibal feels his exhale like it’s a breath of his own. A confession.

“For yourself.”

Will looks down and away at last and the light makes the shadows of his lashes on his cheeks look like the cut on his forehead. He seems in every way like a man halfway through death by a thousand cuts who is utterly bored with the proceedings.

“I don’t remember the last time I was afraid for myself, not when I got stabbed, not in the Hobb’s kitchen, not looking down the barrel of a gun.”

“Spent too long busy being afraid of yourself.”

“Please-“ Will tips his head back against the wall and squeezes his eyes closed.

Hannibal takes the time to observe without being observed, to see the movement of his throat when he swallows, the little tremor like an electric shock from the chill morning and the adrenaline. Mostly Hannibal looks at the wound on his forehead and all of the dangerous things it makes him think, his hands clench into fists at his sides.

 _A mouth filled with stones, frantic nail marks scratched into a brick wall, twisted, bloody metal and_ \- something dark must slip through onto Hannibal’s unguarded, distracted face and fill up the silence because Will has opened his eyes and is looking at him like he hasn’t ever seen him before, like he might really see him.

“Something was taken from her,” Will whispers, “somebody, and I want to feel sorry for her. I do. I want to understand why she would try to kill like that. Daughter for a daughter I suppose. An eye for an eye. I get it but it’s Abigail, you know? It’s Abigail’s life and it’s my life and the sand of my priorities, my intentions, are shifting.”

Hannibal can’t speak. Hannibal is speechless and Will is fighting for his life and Abigail is asleep upstairs, safe, and maybe this isn’t real. It can’t be with that set of circumstances all existing in one place, one time. This is all happening in some carefully constructed place between the three of them; because there is no way that anything can make Hannibal feel this, this trepidation and awe.

The desire to keep something safe is a baby bird in his hand, all it’s fine and crushable bones under him. But now the bird is drawing blood with it’s sharp and clever beak. Hannibal wants to pin it by the wings but he also wants to let it go, let it rage away.

Perhaps without realising, Will angles his body slightly so that he is stood between the pathway to Abigail and the rest of the world. It is nothing less than adorable really; Hannibal could take him down without even thinking about it. And then Will looks just over Hannibal’s shoulder with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes and says “ _punishment_ ,” and Hannibal isn’t so sure anymore. He doesn’t trust his mouth to speak so he narrows his eyes.

“Everyone seems to be being punished for one thing or another, one sin or another. I’m just about sick of it.”

“Is that what you wanted, when the glass broke when-“ Hannibal strikes quickly, softly, moving his hand up to Will’s forehead. His fingers rest half a millimetre from the skin.

Will doesn’t move at all.

 _I would do it_ , Hannibal screams inwardly, _I would do such violence for you_.

He isn’t used to such inner realisations in close proximity and

“I wanted to,” Will breathes.

_I would do it for you_

Hannibal could be halfway out the door already, plastic sheeting in the trunk of the Bentley and vengeance guiding his hand; he has acted quicker and worse for less. But now his hand is halfway to touching Will’s face so he stays instead.

Hoping the shifting sand might just swallow up the house, move them and keep them. The house breathes when they don’t and Abigail makes a noise in her sleep, soft and pained. Will sways on his feet and Hannibal finally, finally, drops his hand to grip the bannister instead.

“Are you staying?” Will asks, like they can’t both feel Abigail’s nightmare dripping down the stairs, like they aren’t bone tired and swaying on their feet; as if Hannibal hasn’t thought of all the ways he could break all of the bones that cast that first stone and yet is still here stood close against Will and trying to keep his hands and his mind to himself.

Will sighs, terrifyingly unreadable, and gently brushes past Hannibal down the stairs.

Hannibal stands for half a second, long enough to end a life smash a glass end everything, then he picks up the blankets and follows Will down into the dark.


End file.
